Modern science fiction spends a lot of time painting dystopian landscapes and not a lot of time proposing solutions to the problems that cause dystopias. Neal Stephenson's new work finally takes on global warming. (From 2021)
That's obviously right, but the myth of the hero galloping to the rescue—a thing that actually happens in, by the way—gets more and more compelling the closer the metaphoric meteor gets. I could use a little hope, no matter how unrealistic.
That might be why Stephenson demurs at the suggestion that he's doing anything other than writing something plausible—that he might be offering a big fictional engine to power some Silicon Valley dream machine. I get it. Maybe it'd sound pretentious for a modern novelist to say, flat out, that they hoped to inspire social change with their art. But I push back anyway. This is sci-fi, after all.
After 30 years on the job I'm starting to suspect that shouting “But science!” from the back of the room might not actually be making enough of a difference. He thinks that someone, or some country, is going to try solar geoengineering. Climate change is too big a problem, and geoengineering “is a cheap, easy-to-implement, flawed, controversial approach that sooner or later someone is going to implement,” he says. But he denies that he's pitching a Big Science Billionaire as any kind of solution. It's just a novel. Said billionaire “just does it, without any regulation,” Stephenson says, laughing a bit at his own narrative juke.
Still, Stephenson's identification of geoengineering as a Big Vision could have real significance. His superscience this time isn't a metaverse or a space colony. It's engineering to address an imminent threat.
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